The Sceptic

Portrait of Robert William Service
Robert William Service 1874–1958

My Father Christmas passed away When I was barely seven. At twenty-one, alack-a-day, I lost my hope of heaven.

Yet not in either lies the curse: The hell of it's because I don't know which loss hurt the worse -- My God or Santa Claus.

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Chris Estruth Libby187 words
  1. Chris Estruth Libby United States

    My father passed away when I was 10 years old, which devastated me, turned my life upside down. Up to that point in my life, all our holidays, summers and almost every weekend were spent with my cousins at the ranch, we all lived in the same city, we lived in town they up on the mountain. After Daddy died I got to the ranch only one more time, due to "a family situation", which I never fully understood. And as I sit…

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    My father passed away when I was 10 years old, which devastated me, turned my life upside down. Up to that point in my life, all our holidays, summers and almost every weekend were spent with my cousins at the ranch, we all lived in the same city, we lived in town they up on the mountain. After Daddy died I got to the ranch only one more time, due to "a family situation", which I never fully understood. And as I sit here, 40+ years later, I still don't understand it...I only know how much it hurt then and how much it still hurts. It's not something I dwell on, life goes on and we go with it. When I was in Catholic school, 7th or 8th grade I think, we had to memorize a poem...this is the poem I memorized, the only poem I ever memorized. It spoke to me then and it still does...I lost more than my father on that September day, and the funny thing is, even as a little child, I knew my life would be forever changed, and it was.

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